Consider: The world is on fire.

We live in the world.

Given that we live in the world, which is on fire, how ought we relate to it?

This question is painful to grapple with. So painful, in fact, that there are at least two varieties of wishing it away: (1) the world is doomed, the fire will eat everything, there is nothing we can do; (2) the fire is good actually, we should want the fire to eat everything, let's make the fire go faster. While we believe that, taken wholesale, both approaches are misguided, we also believe that they each contain a grain of truth: The fire is, in fact, daunting. The fire is, in fact, very large in scope, and requires humanity to display coordination and competence. We must buck up and face the tangled horror-problems reality presents us with. We must not solve easier problems than those to make ourselves feel good. We must stare the monster in the face. Fire is good, eventually. For humanity to grow up is for humanity to become powerful: to let that flame burn away the proems that plague us, so that utopia can flower in the ash. Many of the technologies, attitudes and ideas contained in the gasoline making the fire worse are cousins to beautiful fingers that point toward this end.

We believe the synthesis of these attitudes presents a secret third option-a way of relating to reality such that answering the question becomes not only bearable, but fun:

Hope. Good-old-fashioned hope. Dangerous, beguiling, loveable hope. Hope so unbearable it makes the world seem bearable, after all.

What is hope? First, hope is distinct from optimism. Things are actually pretty bad right now, and on track to becoming much worse; if we want things to get better, we should not delude ourselves into thinking things are already fine. To be optimistic about the current state of affairs would be to live in delusion.

While optimism is a summary statistic of reality, hope is a stance one can take with respect to reality, regardless of how grim reality really is. Hope is a stance characterized by contradiction: to take on hope as a stance is to dream up fantastical wondrous futures, and explore strange thought experiments probing at fundamental ideas; but also to be relentlessly practical about immediate actions that can be taken, and carefully consider how those actions will eventually lead to good outcomes. Hope is not a stance to be taken on alone, because the future will be lived-in by more than one person.

The stance of hope is very much not the stance of heroism. Note that slogging through a field, bloody and bruised, arms shaking around your sword, swiping at fire-breathing dragons is not actually fun! Being a hero is not fun. The stance of hope thus does not require you to be a hero.

We believe that formulating this stance of hope, and putting it into practice, will require cognitive variety and exploration. We believe that art is preparadigmatic philosophy is preparadigmatic mathematics is preparadigmatic science is preparadigmatic engineering is preparadigmatic policy. We believe that we should mine insights from all parts of this funnel, put these varied techniques and aesthetics into considered dialogue, and carefully tend to what emerges. The guiding question of the conference will be:

What kind of future do we actually want, and how do we get there?